Apple may not want the word 'computer' in its title anymore, but it's hard to ignore the impact of the Macintosh on the bottom line. Despite a report of flat shipments, plus all the attention given to the iPod, iPhone and Apple TV in the last month, the Mac had a solid quarter for the period that ended on Dec. 30. Apple reported selling about 1.6 million of its signature product during the quarter. The Mac also saw its revenue share increase by about 40 percent compared to last year.

1. Dual xserve config w/failover .. Apple has a document and mentions using rsync (popular file sync tool for unix.. included with OS X) for syncing files. However, it does not work (crashes, hangs the system, core dump, unable to quit, forces reboot of server..) - has support done anything about it? Nope. So even though they *claim* functionality, you can't effectively impliment it in a production environment.

2. "Premium Support" - again, xserve. 4-hour support.. had a *hardware* problem where a sensor was reporting inaccurate numbers for CPU 1 .. this was causing the server to do an unclean shutdown (to protect the hardware). It wasn't until after several weeks of working with technical support (running tests after test, sending hundreds of MB of diagnostic info to apple, etc..) that they ended up replacing the faulty CPU (which apparently has the sensor built in). This is *PREMIUM* support for a server level product.

3. NVidia video cards accessing memory over 2GB .. Apple sells the configuration, but when it crashes computers, they wipe their support forums CLEAN of this and claim ignorance (search slashdot in the last week or so for ample additional examples of this "support").

Sure Apple was all fine and dandy perhaps a few years ago, but lately it seems overall the "premium" nature of the brand is diminishing. Even the graphics arts people are stuck running on older, slower non-Intel based Macs due to the lack of an Intel-based Photoshop release.. Further tarnishing of the brand .. It seems like Jobs is more interested in ipods and iphones ..